You might have noticed an almost complete absence of posts about wine from this blog. There’s a simple reason for it. Wine scares me to death. The presence of a bona fide wine expert in the family doesn’t help, either, but that aside, I know very little about wine, despite drinking my fair share of [...]
I’ve never really liked ‘performance’ cookery. Most of the cooking I do is on the hoof, unplanned, un-shopped-for and generally last minute and chaotic. Quite often, it’s done without really enough time. It’s in this type of cooking that the real skill lies. What marks out a great cook is not the ability to produce [...]
Chicken and Other Birds is the latest book from John Torode, the Australian chef behind Smiths of Smithfield and one of the presenters of the BBC’s Masterchef. The purpose of Torode’s book is very simple and very clear. He sees chicken as one of the cornerstones of a cook’s repertoire. “If you can roast a [...]
Most people have a few cookbooks, some of which get used a couple of times, providing the odd dish or two before being left on the shelf and forgotten, others of which are used over and over again for years, decades, gradually acquiring a coat of flour, grease, stains, spills. Battered books that work hard. [...]